Women and Men in the Workplace: Divergent Experiences, Disappointing Realities

A recent analysis shows that women are still not catching up to men in the workplace. Here are some of the key findings. Save

In the climate of empowering movements like #MeToo and #TimesUp, it can be tempting to think that we’re finally achieving gender parity. Yet it seems for each stride forward that women make in these arenas, a new study comes out that reveals how far we still have to come, particularly in the workplace.

And as a recent analysis from the Hamilton Project at the Brookings Institute shows, women are still not catching up to men in the labor market. Here are some of the key findings of the analysis:

Your experience in the labor market depends on your gender.

While we might like to think that we’ve moved beyond this, the research shows that compared to their male counterparts, women are still:

Paid less per hour

Work fewer hours outside the home

Enter different occupations

As a result, women end up with a trickle-down effect of additional disparities, which include less:

Wealth over time

Security in retirement

Access to work-linked social safety net programs, like unemployment insurance

The gender wage gap: incomplete progress.

The Hamilton Project noted that while there has been some evolution over the decades in the hourly pay gap, significant disparities remain. If we look back nearly 40 years to 1979, the wage gap had been triple its current figure, at about $9 per hour, while in 2016 it was $3 an hour.

Yes, it’s significant progress on some levels, yet as the Hamilton Project director Jay Shambaugh and policy director Ryan Nunn note: “…the continuing male wage advantage may be surprising in light of the strides women have made in educational attainment.” The directors add that women still only earn about 85% of men’s earnings—even after controlling for differences in education, occupation, age, and race.

Women still do different jobs than men.

Another way that gender disparities are continuing to manifest is via the separation of men and women into distinct types of occupations. In fact, these job discrepancies have varied little over the past two decades, according to the Hamilton Project, with occupations on average netting out at either 75% male/25% female, or vice versa. Shambaugh and Nunn note that the following factors, among others, may be linked to this occupational segregation:

Job flexibility

Social norms

Labor market discrimination

Why is this so important? Women tend to cluster in the lower-paid fields, which contributes to the vicious cycle of women continuing to earn less than men.

Fewer women are joining the labor force.

The Hamilton Project also reports that women’s participation in the labor force has been trending downward for close to 20 years. Starting around 2000, women aged 25 to 54 saw their participation fall, and this dip was most notable for those with a high school degree or less. These women’s participation fell from a high point of 71%, to just 62% in 2016.

What’s behind this trend? Decreasing demand for low-skilled labor is part of the equation, as it is for low-skilled men. But it’s important to note that the American experience of the women’s labor force decline differs from what’s happening in many other countries, which see women at prime working ages joining the labor force at a higher rate. While women in the United States were previously more likely to participate in the labor force than women in other advanced economies, the nation has now fallen well below average.

There’s no silver bullet to solving these problems, but women looking for a starting point on how to start to address these issues personally, within their own career, can check out this post on how to ask for more money at work.